October 24, 2015 – 12:48 pm
A culture, a civilization, is a memetic ecosystem. If one species — a ritual, a tradition, a way of modeling some aspect of the world — goes extinct, the effect may reverberate through the entire habitat.
October 22, 2015 – 10:22 pm
Well, there’s plenty to talk about tonight, in particular the lurid Benghazi hearings and Barack Obama’s pugnacious veto of a military-funding bill, but I just can’t summon up the will. Pick your team and join the shouting. This has all gone so far beyond any possibility of comity or reconciliation that anything I might say […]
October 21, 2015 – 10:39 pm
Back in 2007, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister gave a talk on why men and women are not the same. It’s lucid and thoughtful, and well worth your time. Read it here.
October 20, 2015 – 8:26 pm
In our recent post on neoreactionary bloggers, we noted again, as we have often done before, the applicability of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to social decay. Our reader ‘antiquarian’, in the comment thread, pointed out that the late Robert Conquest’s (p.b.u.h.) Second Law of Politics also describes an entropic rule. For those of you […]
October 20, 2015 – 11:27 am
Here’s a tart item from XX Committee‘s John Schindler on our military bureaucracy’s largely unsuccessful attempt to come to grips with the Islamic State. It’s not encouraging. There may also be another problem Mr. Schindler doesn’t mention. Recently I attended a talk by a former Navy intelligence analyst on the doctrinal underpinnings of Sunni jihad. […]
October 19, 2015 – 2:03 pm
In his daily Best of the Web newsletter, James Taranto comments (behind the WSJ paywall, unfortunately) on how openly the Democrats are now sharpening their knives, licking their lips, and fixing their gaze on the assets of the wealthy. He refers in particular to an item in the New York Times by Patricia Cohen that […]
October 17, 2015 – 10:40 pm
A pretty sunset today in Wellfleet today, looking northwest from Duck Harbor:
October 16, 2015 – 12:14 pm
“Neoreactionaries” are a wordy bunch, and it’s hard to keep up with the volume of blogorrhea they produce every week. If you’re interested, Nick B. Steves, who appears these days to be NRx’s General Secretary, posts his own gleanings from the “reactosphere” in a weekly, somewhat Catholic-leaning summary, here, and he’s also put together a […]
October 15, 2015 – 2:23 pm
In a recent post, Cassandra’s Blues, I mentioned that some of my friends, relatives, and correspondents find my take on current events, and my outlook for our future, a little “dour”. (Okay, all of them do, and looking back over the last few entries here, I can see why they might feel that way.) I’ll […]
October 14, 2015 – 12:48 pm
Here’s another strong and detailed post from M. G. at Those Who Can See, this time on the “refugee” crisis in Europe. Take the time to read it all.
October 13, 2015 – 7:56 pm
In the comment-thread to our previous post, our resident left-wing gadfly and Obama-administration cheerleader — resplendent as always in saddle shoes, pleated skirt, class sweater and pom-poms — tried to make the case that the resurgent forces of genuine conservatism on the Right had sinned against America by exerting their influence in opposition to current […]
October 10, 2015 – 1:17 pm
The Cold Civil War is heating up, and if the Left has its way, among the casualties will be the Constitutional order in which co-equal branches of government check and balance each other’s power. This being the bedrock of the American system, and our penultimate bulwark against tyranny, the times may soon become “interesting”, and […]
October 7, 2015 – 1:54 pm
You may read a lot of academic papers, but I doubt you’ve seen a better abstract than this.
October 7, 2015 – 11:44 am
For years we’ve been told that dietary fat is bad for us, and that we should avoid it. Of course not everyone was saying this, but it was one of those “consensus” things, where dissenters were hectored and sneered at by those in the mainstream, and the government applied what pressure it could to enforce […]
October 6, 2015 – 4:36 pm
For you blue-state dwellers, here’s some ammo for those cocktail-party ambushes.
October 6, 2015 – 2:37 pm
A passage from Henry F. Pringle’s excellent 1931 biography of Theodore Roosevelt describes a piece of legislation known as the Raines Law (passed in Albany in 1896, when Roosevelt was president of the New York City Police Commission). It gives us a lovely example of another, higher Law, having to do with unintended consequences: Ostensibly […]
October 5, 2015 – 5:07 pm
In the mail today came a link to an excellent, informative, and even-handed article on inequality, social mobility, and the heritability of advantageous traits. The author is an Englishman named Toby Young, and he zeroes in nicely on the question one comes to once one has hacked through the thorny ideological thicket surrounding these topics. […]
October 4, 2015 – 9:15 pm
The indefatigable JK has posted a link, in one of our recent comment threads, to an outstanding article that deserves promotion to the front page: an in-depth look at high- and low-trust societies and how they got that way. Read it here.
October 4, 2015 – 11:57 am
In the New York public-transportation system there’s an ad campaign that features the slogan “If you see something, say something!” Its motive is unabashedly conservative: it seeks to make the community sensitive, and responsive, to existential threats. The problem is that such threats can take familiar forms that are easy to overlook, especially in a […]
October 3, 2015 – 10:36 am
In today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I recommend again to you all), we find a link to the following story: Incident of drunk man kicking humanoid robot raises legal questions We read: A few weeks ago, a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a […]
October 2, 2015 – 2:11 pm
Well, it looks like Hurricane Joaquin is going to give the mainland a miss. That means a remarkable streak will continue: it’s been almost ten years since a major hurricane last struck the continental United States, higher levels of CO2 notwithstanding. Just sayin’.
October 2, 2015 – 12:22 pm
We’ve all been hearing about the scandal at Volkswagen, in which the company installed “cheater” software that restricted emissions only during testing. The CEO, Martin Winterkorn, has resigned in disgrace, reviled by all goodthinkful people. The software cheat was a crazy move, because it was bound to be discovered sooner or later. Why would the […]
October 1, 2015 – 9:43 am
Here’s a tart (and uncharacteristically brief) item by Mencius Moldbug that, despite being several years old, seems apropos.
September 30, 2015 – 6:01 pm
Big day in the Mideast: now that the Iranian deal is done, Russia is swiftly consolidating its control over Syria, and is demanding that we leave. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the Russians are busily establishing a secure zone in the eastern Mediterranean. It appears that they are also mounting airstrikes, but not against […]
September 30, 2015 – 10:02 am
Here’s another story from the Times, and for me, it’s a mighty sad one: The Music May Stop at a Storied Manhattan Studio The facility in question is Avatar Studios, which has for almost forty years been one of the finest recording studios in the world. It is now up for sale, and if history […]
September 29, 2015 – 8:32 pm
Here’s a headline from the New York Times: Rise of Austrian Right Lengthens Shadow of Nazi Era The article comments on the rise in Austria of anti-immigrant sentiment. What is remarkable, although not surprising, is that the entire continuum of political opinion on the question of immigration and and of the ethnic and religious composition […]
September 28, 2015 – 9:33 pm
Well, we’re back. It had been decades since I’d been to Vienna, and I’d forgotten what a lovely city it is. Gracious, orderly, and physically beautiful, it is a perfect embodiment of the sublime cultural achievements of a great civilization at its apex. (That apex is of course long past, but for now the order, […]
September 21, 2015 – 2:52 pm
Having passed a lovely weekend in Vienna, the lovely Nina and I are now in Istanbul. We’ll be back home, and this long-neglected blog will be beginning to get back to normal, early next week. I must say, there is a certain something about seats of empire. Even when the thing has thoroughly run its […]
September 15, 2015 – 9:04 pm
I’ve written several posts about the culture of victimhood and microaggression now hegemonic in academia and elsewhere. Among other points, I’ve noted that such a culture of perceived oppression is actually made possible only by the clemency of the ambient culture: It is as if the grievance culture is a little “virtual machine” running inside […]
September 10, 2015 – 11:09 pm
Even though we’ve only just reopened the storefront here, the business may be mostly shuttered again for the next couple of weeks — this weekend we are off to a musical retreat in the Isles of Shoals, and then we’ll be getting a firsthand look at the European situation for the rest of the month. […]
September 7, 2015 – 10:20 pm
With the migrant crisis in Europe at full boil, immigration is a hot topic. I’ve just had another round with our multiculturalist gadfly in the previous post’s comment thread, but of course we’ve been over all of this before. I invite readers to review, in particular, the long and patient discussion we had here, which […]
September 4, 2015 – 10:46 pm
Though it’s September, and time to get back to business around here, I haven’t had enough quiet time over the past few days to do any serious writing. (Though you may find it hard to believe, it actually takes me rather a long time to produce a substantial post — and then there’s coming up […]
September 2, 2015 – 9:52 pm
Something I hear a lot, in the ultra-blue precincts I haunt, is that the Second Amendment is a superannuated relic, an eighteenth-century atavism, and has no place in modern America. I hear mutterings about flintlocks and muskets, and become aware of a prevailing sentiment that the thing simply ought to be chucked. Well, have a […]
September 1, 2015 – 9:36 pm
It’s September, and time to get back in harness. Have I missed anything? I have nothing prepared for tonight, but the little grey cells should be back in writing order again sometime in the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s a fantastic drum solo, some solid climate heresy, a video clip I find amusing, and some […]
August 22, 2015 – 11:22 am
To a first approximation, every species that ever was is extinct. It is within a rounding error to say that every ancestral lineage that ever began eventually petered out. Imagine Nature as a machine-gunner firing into a crowd. The fact that you and I exist means that for four billion years, our personal ancestors have […]
August 9, 2015 – 12:43 pm
It’s August, and as I do every year I am going to disconnect from the Internet a bit. It’s necessary therapy — particularly so this year, I think, as I think the quality of recent posts has been noticeably off. I also need to take some time to think about just what I want to […]
August 7, 2015 – 12:17 pm
Well, this is interesting: Senator Charles Schumer has decided to oppose the Iran deal. From the New York Times: Advocates on both sides have strong cases for their point of view that cannot simply be dismissed,’ Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in a lengthy statement. “This has made evaluating the agreement a difficult […]
August 4, 2015 – 12:28 pm
I don’t often link to WSJ editorials, but their comment here on President Obama’s latest regulatory audacity is worth reading. The gist: the States should simply refuse to be bullied in this way. The WSJ’s idea is that the Court will, rightly, strike this thing down as a usurpation of the law-making power of Congress […]
August 3, 2015 – 10:36 pm
The inescapable Neil deGrasse Tyson informs us that scientific illiteracy is “a tragedy of our times”. Not “the” tragedy of our times, mind you, just “a” tragedy of our times. There are, you see, just so many of them — so many, in fact, that it’s becoming hard to keep track of which ones to […]
I’ve just read a book I must recommend to you all — Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, by Michael Malice. The book is extraordinary in that it captures, with frightening accuracy, not only the near-solipsistic narcissism of the fully developed totalitarian dictator, but also the seductiveness of the expertly managed personality […]
With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter Libertybelle, here’s a strong piece by Mark Steyn on the way things happen.
Here’s a good item, just posted to an aging comment-thread by the indefatigable JK: Why Does the Republican Party Exist? For some real political geekdom, read the last link in the article, on the highway-bill’s pension gimmick. Also just in from JK: this explanation of Donald Trump’s surging popularity.
Here is an article from Vox about a trans-gendered high-school student, with a female body, who wants to use the boy’s bathroom. The title of the piece is: A federal judge said being transgender is a mental disorder. Here’s why he’s wrong. The piece relies for its argument on the recent (2013) reclassification, by the […]
Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know about: “anting”. From Gilbert Waldbauer’s What Good are Bugs?: The amazing behaviors by which many birds, including some quail and a multitude of perching birds, use or solicit ants to free their bodies of lice and parasitic mites are known as anting, Birds ant in two quite different […]
OK, this is interesting: ‘Impossible’ rocket drive works and could get to Moon in four hours Some details here.
Here’s a treat: Dick Cavett interviewing the great Oscar Peterson at the piano. And when you’re done with that, check this out.
Here’s a good post by Lewis Amselem, a.k.a. ‘Diplomad’, on race relations in the West. He begins: Let me be blunt: I find that discussions of race quickly get boring, idiotic, inconclusive, and, often, verbally and even physically violent. Race tells you very little if anything about a person and his or her attributes except, […]
On presentism: One of the characteristic mental disorders of our period is an easy contempt for the past. It’s not just that we are taught to hate the past, for one can respect and still detest an enemy. It’s that we despise it. We observe it with an easy, swaggering and thoroughly unquestioned contempt. We […]
This is just the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. I can hardly focus my eyes on it.